He couldn’t stop thinking about Katie and the party. He was dreading it. He shouldn’t go. He would have an awful time. Most of Katie’s friends probably knew one another. They would stare at him and whisper behind his back.
But a small part of him was eager to see her again. Did that mean he wasn’t ready to die?
No. The plan was the plan, and he would still go through with it.
The sun was weak and the sky above Trenton was full of scudding clouds, breaking apart and re-forming. Like a kaleidoscope. His thoughts, too, broke apart and re-formed.
Light flickered. Shadows skated across the shelves, and Trenton shivered. He thought about the accident. He had memories, fragmented and strange, of a hundred shadowlike hands carrying him down a dark tunnel.
And then he felt it. Or heard it. He didn’t know which but he knew: someone had just entered the greenhouse. He sat up, suddenly alert, his mind sharpening.
Trenton’s throat closed so tight he couldn’t even scream.
She was there. And yet she was not there. A thing, an unmistakable presence. He knew it was a girl—or a woman—because of the way it moved, shifting in the sun, watching him from behind a shadow of hair.
It didn’t occur to him that he was just high, and seeing things. He’d smoked plenty of times before—weed was the only thing that helped him float through his months at Andover—and once had even seen a bathroom wall pulsating in and out.
But never anything like this. She was real. He felt it, too, in the stiff terror that seized him, the desperate desire to cry out, and the dryness of his mouth.
The longer he looked, the more she materialized: shoulder blades cut from shadow and green eyes flashing like dark leaves. Hair teeth mouth, br**sts small as two bare flower buds.
Go away, Trenton tried to say, but couldn’t. He felt like he was back in the hospital again, paralyzed, arms and legs useless and unresponsive. Leave me alone.
She spoke. The words came to him, a faint, dry rustle on the wind that lifted and turned the leaves scattered on the greenhouse floor.
“What am I?” she asked. “What happened to me?”
The terror left Trenton at once, replaced by a sadness so cutting and deep he felt like he wanted to cry. It was worse than anything he’d felt in years—worse, so much worse, than the lack of happiness he was used to, a hollow negative space of no feelings at all. This was a dark, black pit of sadness, like staring into a well and seeing a child trapped at its bottom. He knew, without knowing how he knew, that she was scared.
Almost without realizing it, he sat up and extended a hand to her, the way he would have done with a stray animal.
There was a loud crack, then the sound of splintering glass. Trenton ducked, cursing. His first thought was that another lightbulb had exploded, but then he remembered there were no lightbulbs in the greenhouse.
“Shit!” Minna’s voice, muffled through the thick glass walls, came to him; then she was shoving into the greenhouse from the garden, using her shoulder. That door had obviously remained unused for years and was practically rusted shut.
“What the hell?” Trenton was shaking, furious. The girl—the ghost, he thought, and then knew that it was true—was gone. Where she had been was nothing more than a narrow rectangle of light, and dust mites revolving slowly. He felt an unaccountable sense of loss.
“Oh.” Minna had finally managed to get the door open and entered, red-faced, pushing her hat back from her forehead. “Hey. I didn’t get you, did I? That f**king thing fires to the left.”
“Get me?” Only then did Trenton understand what the cracking noise had been, just as he noticed a bullet wedged into the wooden shelf two inches from his left knee. Distantly, he heard his mom calling for them, her voice high-pitched, hysterical.
He was so angry he could hardly speak. “What the hell, Minna?” He was screaming; even he was surprised to hear it. “What the f**k were you thinking? You could have killed me.”
“I said I was sorry,” Minna said, even though she hadn’t. She plunked down a pistol; Trenton recognized it as the one from his father’s desk, and he was even angrier that she had figured out how to load it. “It wasn’t my fault, anyway. I’m telling you, that thing—”
“Pulls to the left. Yeah. You said.” Trenton’s head was pounding. He hadn’t imagined it. He knew he hadn’t. Minna said someone had been murdered in the house. Had he really just seen her?
“I was trying to get that goddamn coyote.” Minna was still wearing the thermal shirt she liked to sleep in.
“What?” When Trenton tried to stand, he realized how stoned he was. He got a rush of black to his head.
Minna wasn’t looking at him, thank God. “It’s the size of a frigging pony. It was sniffing around the house this morning. I was worried Amy would try and pet the damn thing.”
Caroline burst through the door that connected the greenhouse to the pantry, wearing nothing but a thin bathrobe, open, over her nightgown. For one horrifying second, Trenton had a perfect view of his mom’s br**sts, each shaped like the flap on an envelope, swinging loosely beneath the thin silk. He looked away quickly. “What happened? I thought I heard a shot.”
“There was a coyote,” Minna started to explain, but Caroline cut her off.
“A coyote? What about the police? Did you call them?”
Trenton looked up sharply. “The what?”
Minna stared. “What are you talking about?”
Caroline had obviously just gotten out of bed. The sheets had left faint creases, small webs, across her chest and cheek. “The police,” she said. “There’s a squad car coming up the drive.”
CAROLINE
“I don’t want them in the house,” Caroline said. “Don’t let them come into the house.” She knew she sounded hysterical but couldn’t help it.
She felt a panic attack coming on. That happened to her sometimes. Her mouth would go dry and she couldn’t breathe and her heart would beat like a dry moth in her throat, and she would know, absolutely know, that she was dying.
There had been streaks of blood in the toilet this morning—her lungs, maybe, or her liver. Ever since the doctor had lectured her about the possibility of cirrhosis, she had imagined her liver like a dying fish, gasping in the middle of a toxic oil spill.
She needed a drink. But she couldn’t drink with the police in the house. She still remembered the cop who had arrested her after she’d rear-ended that stupid woman, the way he’d hauled her roughly to the car, not caring that she was sick, not caring that Trenton was in the backseat. And the cop who’d called to tell her about Trenton’s accident—a woman, that time. He might not make it, she’d said casually, like a grocery store clerk explaining that a coupon was no longer valid.